the past. He stands before us in the suttas as a man of amazing power
of will, inaccessible to fear, promises and, one may add, to argument
but yet in comparison with other religious leaders singularly gentle in
taking the offensive against error. Often he simply ignored it as
irrelevant: "Never mind" he said on his deathbed to his last convert
"Never mind, whether other teachers are right or wrong. Listen to me, I
will teach you the truth." And when he is controversial his method is
often to retain old words in honourable use with new meanings. The
Brahmans are not denounced like the Pharisees in the New Testament but
the real Brahman is a man of uprightness and wisdom: the real sacrifice
is to abstain from sin and follow the Truth.

Women played a considerable part in the entourage of Gotama. They were
not secluded in India at that time and he admitted that they were
capable of attaining saintship. The work of ministering to the order, of
supplying it with food and raiment, naturally fell largely to pious
matrons, and their attentive forethought delighted to provide for the
monks those comforts which might be accepted but not asked for.
Prominent among such donors was Visakha, who married the son of a
wealthy merchant at Savatthi and converted her husband's family from
Jainism to the true doctrine. The Vinaya recounts how after entertaining
the Buddha and his disciples she asked eight boons which proved to be
the privileges of supplying various classes of monks with food, clothing
and medicine and of providing the nuns with bathing dresses, for, said
she, it shocked her sense of propriety to see them bathing naked. But
the anecdotes respecting the Buddha and women, whether his wife or
others, are not touched with sentiment, not even so much as is found in
the conversation between Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi in the Upanishad. To
women as a class he gave their due and perhaps in his own opinion more
than their due, but if he felt any interest in them as individuals, the
sacred texts have obliterated the record. In the last year of his life
he dined with the courtezan Ambapali and the incident has attracted
attention on account of its supposed analogy to the narrative about
Christ and "the woman which was a sinner." But the resemblance is small.
There is no sign that the Buddha, then eighty years of age, felt any
personal interest in Ambapali. Whatever her morals may have been, she
was a benefactress of the order and he sim